Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
Interpretation
Curiosity leads to open-mindedness and a peaceful acceptance of life's unpredictability.
Alistair Cooke's quote suggests that curiosity enhances one's ability to engage in arguments generously and maintain a calm lifestyle. This state of mind is rooted in a cheerful acceptance of life’s unpredictable nature, fostering a willingness to embrace whatever comes, rather than resisting or trying to control it.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the value of curiosity in education.
More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.
We destroy ourselves when we stop feeling. If you bury your feelings within you, you become a graveyard.
If your heart is large enough to envelop your adversaries, you can see right through them and avoid their attacks. And once you envelop them, you will be able to guide them along the path indicated to you by heaven and earth.
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
Do not go to the garden of flowers!_x000D_ O friend! go not there;_x000D_ In your body is the garden of flowers._x000D_ Take your seat on the thousand petals of the_x000D_ lotus, and there gaze on the infinite beauty.
Pour some water into a tub and stir it up. Now try as hard as you can to calm the water with your hands; you will succeed in agitating it further. Let it stand undisturbed a while, and it will calm down by itself. The human brain works much the same way.
Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world no external threat can penetrate build exaggeratedly high defense againts the outside world, againts new people, new places, different experiences and leave their own world stripped bare. It is there that bitterness begins irrevocable work.
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